A. Warren Merkey Read online

  FAR FREEDOM

  by

  A. Warren Merkey

  copyright © 2009 by A. Warren Merkey

  This book is dedicated to my wife Cynthia, without whose encouragement Far Freedom would never have been written.

  Part 1 KESHONA

  Section 000 Kansas 1986

  “Why the hell should I care? Why the hell do you care? The universe doesn’t care; if it did, babies wouldn’t die.”

  But why had she come this far with me? Babies wouldn’t die? “God, you mean?” I ignored her rhetorical questions. We both cared, we both knew why. What was this about babies?

  “Shut up about God! What does God have to do with this crap ?”

  “It’s a miracle it works.” I assumed we were still talking about the same thing. “It’s a miracle we haven’t killed each other.”

  She laughed. Was she amused? I could rarely tell. She was a miracle herself. She gave me the numbers. I would never understand how. She was a genius. She was a bitch. “It’s a miracle because we’re too ignorant to know how we hit the cosmic lottery!”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Always-the-more!”

  “It would shut me up. It might even put us all out of our misery.”

  “Not gonna happen. I like misery. That’s why I married you!”

  Why? Really. Why marry me? “I’m going out!” Getting out. Bugging out. Freaking out. Dropping out.

  “Out where?”

  “Out out!” I hoped I was cool and inscrutable on the outside. I never knew whether I deserved to feel so angry. I never wanted to find out. The only anger I knew that was legitimate was the anger I aimed at myself.

  “You know how?”

  I nodded slowly, watching for some change in her that I would never see.

  “Fine! Enjoy yourself!”

  I had that damned conversation memorized. The words made puffs of vapor as I shouted them to the cold morning air. Over the words and under my boots the snow squeaked the rhythm of my recitation. “Out out!” Squeak squeak. “Enjoy yourself!” Squeak squeak. I was tired after a long walk, preceded by the stress of evading security checkpoints and navigating dark tunnels. I had not yet tired my emotions. My wife had a magic ability to make me feel alive. She could bring me to tears that I would never show her, tears of joy, tears of rage. I never knew I could feel so much. Tears held back now came forth. I blinked my eyes many times, smearing the bright winter light across my watery vision. The sun was too bright.

  The light from the nearest star was not old and not tired. Redshift. Reluctance of the interface. Because the entire melody is not played on one

  string. Because space is not empty, it’s full of strings, circuits, entities. The strings cross, reluctantly. The circuits vibrate their quanta. The entities mark their spots. My brain is full of strings, circuits, quanta, and crap.

  I heard car tires crunching the snow at the edge of the street. “Doctor Lee,” the big Chevy Suburban said to me. How many African-American friends did I ever have? One, and I was about to lose him, he would be that pissed. He never called me “Doctor Lee,” even when Big Bird was within earshot.

  “Agent Moses.” I never called him that. His name was Karl. He sat in the front passenger seat of the Suburban with the window rolled down. The warm interior of the vehicle was inviting to my frosty ears and cold feet. I would be damned if I would get into that car, as cold and as tired as I was.

  “You’re five miles out from the Hole. How did you get out? Where were you going?”

  Where was I going? Past tense: meaning I was now going nowhere. “To see if Kansas was still here.” I gestured with a bare hand at the sunny winter morning. I could see ice crystals in the bright calm air when the angle of light was just right. Tired little crystals of information redshifted on their vagrant circuits to infinity. I stuck the hand quickly back in my coat pocket.

  “Kansas is still here. It isn’t as nice as Virginia. Get in and let’s go back. This much sky makes me nervous.”

  Normally I would have been quick to do anything Karl asked me to do. He spoke calmly and with respect. He was very professional and a great guy. I almost wished he would berate me in a loud voice, followed by some humorous sarcasm, like he would do when I missed too many times at target practice. “Use a nine, for pete’s sake! You can’t hit anything with that old iron.”

  This fine morning I was mentally impaired. Everything I thought and heard and said was biased by emotions which had not abated in the trek from the Hole. The greatest scientific advance in history was within my grasp and everyone - and especially my wife - was pulling it away from me.

  Karl’s words had an irritating presumption of authority and were completely lacking the friendliness to which I was accustomed. I imagined I never meant anything to Karl and to the other security agents. My preference for their company over that of the technical staff was totally misguided and foolish of me.

  “No. I’m not ready to go back.” My voice was a pitiful blend of resentment and guilt modulated by tremors induced by the cold air.

  “Get in, Doctor Lee.” Karl’s voice contained a threat. It made me angry at him. I wanted to make him understand something - anything - about what was killing me with frustration.

  The light from distant stars is not very old, but it was never about light. It was about gravity and being connected. It was about identity and knowing ice crystal A from ice crystal B.

  I was wound up too tight. My spring broke. I took out Papa’s old pistol, given to him by a GI from the K-War. I shot a hole in the front right tire of the Suburban. The noise was deafening. After a moment I could hear a dog barking but there was no other response from Kansas.

  A railroad locomotive dopplered its warning whistle into my recovering ears, then began redshifting away from my future. There are railroad tracks, with their quanta of trains, and the tracks connect the towns and the trains pull them together. Everything is connected, even the future. The future comes on tracks and it isn’t tired or old. Or expected. Or wanted.

  Karl pushed open his door, almost knocking the pistol from my hand. I pivoted to hold onto it and stopped with it pointing to the right rear tire. I pulled the trigger again. The Chevy listed heavily to starboard with two flat tires on that side. I am still connected to those two bullets of information. Consequences. Their quantum pathways will follow me the rest of my life. Not too far from here.

  Karl stared at me with wide eyes of incredulity as he circled me. He stopped after one orbit. I grabbed my pistol with my other hand and offered it to Karl, holding it by the warm barrel. I was suddenly sane again and mortified at what I did. I had never lost my self-control in such a violent fashion. I was so deflated I couldn’t even feel angry at myself, just miserably sad.

  Karl looked up and down the quiet residential street, ignoring the offer of my weapon. Nobody seemed interested in gunshots and even the dog stopped barking. “I guess we’ll walk.” There was no humor in this too-obvious statement. Karl was famous for his deadpan humor. I could expect no humor from Agent Moses today.

  Walt got out of the back seat and looked at the flat tires while Ed the driver spoke on the radio. Karl started walking. I followed him. He pulled the ear flaps down on his cap. I wished I had ear flaps. I hid my ears behind long hair and the upturned collar of my coat. A few moments later I heard Ed get out of the wounded vehicle and I turned to see him and Walt following us. These were elite federal agents but they looked like three guys you would see in a feed store or the local diner.

  I holstered my pistol. Five rounds left. No, six. Five. I had one in the chamber that I ejected by mistake. How can you ever achieve simultaneity? What is the smallest unit of time? What is the smallest quantum circuit? Why should there be entities if
everything is a wiggling circuit? Where was my missing bullet? I should have put it back in the clip.

  We reached the corner and turned onto Main Street. The sound waves of church music flowed through the air, connecting me to a church on a small island in the Yellow Sea which I had never seen. We could hear the congregation singing in the Methodist church across the street. Toward the west, Main Street quickly turned to highway that ran straight to the horizon. To the east, Main Street bumped into a towering grain elevator, jogged around it, and presumably returned to a horizon-seeking straight line of pavement. We headed east. Ed and Walt stayed a few dozen paces behind us. We were all connected by pathways.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Karl said.

  “I’m hungry.” I ignored the concern in Karl’s words. “Do you have some money on you? I seem to have lost my cash in a poker game.” I played poker with these guys on a regular basis. Probably never again.

  Karl didn’t reply. We walked past several small stores, all of them closed on this Sunday morning. It wasn’t usually possible to tell but I was sure Karl was thinking serious thoughts. He could give me that same bored look and deliver a wisecrack that would have me laughing for minutes. It was an unwelcome and incongruous thought at this time, but better than cosmology.

  “I always assumed you were one of the engineers.”

  Karl made me feel like a liar. On one hand, I was glad he was still talking to me. On the other hand, the tone of his words made me realize I had probably lost one of the few things that kept life in the Hole tolerable - his friendship. First my wife, then everybody else. I was alone again. Alone with redshift.

  “I do have a degree in engineering.” Such a feeble attempt to regain what? Friends. I had no chance of friendship among my well-lettered peers, most of whom felt they were trapped in the Hole. I was a heretic to them, and their impossible task was to discover why my heresy worked.

  “But you’re a physicist,” Karl said. “The physicist. The top dog. That’s your monster in the Hole.”

  “I’m not a physicist, not exactly.” It wasn’t a monster in the Hole, not exactly.

  “What are you?”

  “I’m an astronomer.”

  “Give me a break! What kind of astronomy can you do underground? And that doesn’t need the kind of security we have at the Hole. And you will tell me how you got out of the Hole. This is a Top Secret project. That means dangerous stuff. I hear rumors that scare me, Doctor Lee.”

  Damn, I thought. Underground astronomy: neutrinos. How do they fly the gravity circuit? “Don’t believe such rumors. And quit calling me ‘Doctor Lee.’”

  “Is this because of your wife?”

  That was too easy to guess, and I was too sensitive to suffer it from Agent Moses. “She’s a major contributor.” I was ready to confirm what everybody in the Hole already knew - that my wife and I were not happy with each other. Then the worry struck at me that she would hurt herself again slipping in the bathroom and it would look like I hit her. I hear rumors that scare me, Doctor Lee. The wife-beater and mad scientist has a doomsday device he’s itching to turn on, Agent Moses. Be afraid, be very afraid.

  “That was a real shock, you shooting the tires, especially because it was you. You were the most regular guy of all the crew in the Hole.” I had no reply. Did he sound less anxious? Karl said a good thing about me. I tried hard to be a “regular guy.” I was not a “regular guy” most of the time. I was usually lost in mental space. My wife and I could sit in the same room for hours and say nothing to each other, not because of antipathy but because we voyaged in abstractions. I long ago gave up asking my wife how she clothed my abstractions in her even more abstract mathematics; thus, we said little to each other. Babies? Apparently mathematics was not the only thing she thought about these days. Umbilical thoughts. Entities with tails. Every damn thing is connected.

  “Why didn’t you want my pistol?” I asked.

  “You may need it.” His reply made me shift mental gears. The winter cold suddenly got down the collar of my coat, made me shiver. The future made another blue shift. I was tired and Karl was walking faster than I wanted to walk. I wondered why.

  “Why?”

  “The Hole is not as secret as it was, and neither are the scary rumors.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Maybe nothing. When we found you missing, Duncan told me a few things I did not want to know. He scared me. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  My brain shifted into a higher gear, the one where my imagination races. Faster than light. “Where are we walking to?”

  “To find cover.”

  “Is someone on their way to pick us up?” I was alarmed by the rising tone of Karl’s voice.

  “Very soon, I hope.”

  His hope and my hope - that my breakout would escape serious consequences - died when Ed called from behind us: “Karl, I’ve lost contact with Joe.”

  “Joe? Maybe it’s just a malfunction.”

  “We have triple redundancy. I hope you can shoot as well under fire as you can on the pistol range, Doctor Lee.”

  “Is Joe dead?” No answer. I followed Karl down the sidewalk in front of cars angle-parked on the snowy red brick for church service across the street. This was too sudden, too wrong, too unreal. Karl halted, holding up a finger that meant be quiet. We heard the helicopter then. “This is insane!” I was upset with the absurdity of the possible danger. “What can they hope to do? They can’t have mounted any well-planned action, whoever they are.”

  “Maybe as many as four operatives, not counting the pilot. Stay here.”

  Karl left me in the recess of a store entrance and went back to Ed and Walt. He returned soon and I glimpsed the other two moving off in separate directions. It was still insane! How could an enemy be so aware of such a highly secret military operation? How could they know of my escape from the Hole? How could they be so prepared to act? How could they get me out of the country, if that was their plan? How could they know I was worth the effort? I wasn’t worth the effort. I could try to explain the theory but only my wife knew the numbers to make it work. She tried to explain the math to me. She never tried to explain it to anyone else. It was her secret. She would take it to the grave.

  “The church?” I suggested.

  “How many people do you want to die?” A nine-millimeter automatic appeared in each of his hands. Two pistols! What else did he have under his heavy coat?

  “Are they that desperate?”

  “I don’t want to find out.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Wait here, see what happens, deal with the helicopter first. It has less room to maneuver here between buildings.”

  The rotor noise soon got louder and snow and debris boiled up in the street. We saw it through the plate glass of the old drugstore before it saw us. Karl stepped in front of me, and as the helicopter arrived, drifting just above the parked cars, he fired a barrage of rounds. The helicopter shot upward. Karl shouted something and backed into me. The plate glass exploded all around us and Karl’s reaction propelled both of us backward through the shattered glass door.

  A second helicopter had closely followed the first and pumped machine gun fire into the front of the store. Bullets ripped into the merchandise on the shelves above us, magnifying the smell of cosmetics. I reached for one of Karl’s weapons that fell nearby, to give it back to him. A warning salvo spattered into the floor and I yanked my hand away from the pistol. I stood up, shielding my eyes from the tornado of debris swirling through the store. That made me look down and see the blood on the floor. Karl’s blood, so much blood to have already leaked through his overcoat. If Karl was still alive, I needed to help him! I ignored the helicopter and the gunner in its open hatch. When I tried to examine Karl something hit my shoulder, knocked me down into the glass again, and made my left arm useless. I hardly understood I was shot, hardly realized I could be dying of internal damage. I felt clumsy and weak. Why


  would they shoot me? Didn’t they know who I was?

  I struggled back to my feet, as though that was the logical thing to do: avoid the glass, not the bullets. Reality was not real. Anger was real. The grit in my eyes kept me from seeing if Karl was still alive. I turned around to squint into the whirlwind dust, saw the blurry form of the helicopter. I could barely make out the gunner and his gestures for me to come toward the helicopter. A wave of vertigo washed into my tentative awareness; anger washed it back out. I felt under my coat for the evidence of the wound. My fingers brushed the butt of my pistol. I felt a moment of cowardice as my trembling fingers wouldn’t close on the pistol grip. I finally got enough tears to wash my eyes clear. The sight of Karl lying in the glass and in his own blood shocked my fingers into curling around the pistol butt and squeezing the grip safety. Karl was probably dying because of me. Whatever happened to my old dream of still nights on mountain tops, making photographic plates of galaxies?

  I knew real anger now, anger with myself, and a rage that they wouldn’t let me help Karl. I was crazed into false bravery. I knew I was shot and I was back on my feet and starting to feel pain. I saw the end of my life approaching rapidly. It was only theory. Nothing was real. Thoughts were butterflies, emotions were bullets. I briefly mourned the loss of eventually understanding the mathematics of the Hole. I mourned the loss of eventually understanding my wife. I embraced the theory of death with a mind too cluttered with butterflies and bullets to have much room for the theory of fear.

  Blinking away tears to clear more grit from my eyes, I squinted into the rotor blast and saw the gunner still gesturing for me to come forward. Such patience! It didn’t occur to me that I was being given a chance to live. My sole purpose was to get rid of the helicopter so I could help Karl - or die trying. I needed to get closer to improve my chances of hitting my target. I also needed to give myself time to draw the big forty-five and aim. It seemed only seconds ago I had murdered two defenseless tires. When the gunner’s hand went back to his rifle, I stopped. This made him repeat his gesture to approach, which took his hand away from the trigger. As his hand moved away to signal me, my hand pulled the forty-five from its holster. I didn’t plan any of this.